


A Fallen Legend

by sonofsinder



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Backstory, Fallen (Destiny) - Freeform, Gen, not entirely canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-01
Updated: 2018-09-30
Packaged: 2019-07-21 02:00:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16150178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonofsinder/pseuds/sonofsinder
Summary: I've always wondered what it would be like if Destiny had Fallen Guardians. The original concept art for the game made that idea so tangible and I've had the idea ever since. This story follows an original Guardian and her Ghost through some canon events as well as other, original-ish adventures as they find their way and fight the Darkness. Idk how to write a summary. Hell this is the first creative thing I've written, so let's see how this goes.





	A Fallen Legend

**Author's Note:**

> I have like nine chapters written, so if anyone likes this, I'll post more. This was written before Forsaken came out, so it lacks any new info brought about by that and certainly ignores some other canon stuff. Anyway, enjoy...whatever this is? Obviously don't own any of Bungie/Activision's stuff.

Iris looked out over the vast, broken tundra of the Cosmodrome, derelict planes and massive testaments to human ingenuity crumbling as far as she could see.  
“It really is beautiful,” she said to no one in particular.

A wild roar somewhere far behind her broke her gaze.  
“Well, it is beautiful, at least when the Fallen aren’t chasing me around. Better keep looking before I waste another day,” she muttered, turning back to the task at hand.

Iris crept over the hoods of ruined cars scattered across the massive span of road, scanning in each one for anything. For any tiny spark of Light.  
“This. Is. POINTLESS!”, she screamed, momentarily breaking her usually calm demeanor. “Why is it that every other Ghost can find someone to be their Guardian, but I’m stuck out here with literally tons of corpses, and not a single one carries even a spark!”

She was breathing heavily after her outburst when another roar sounded to her right. Much closer. The Fallen were nothing if not efficient scavengers.  
“Crap. Crap crap crap! Gotta find somewhere to hide, quick,” she rambled, spinning in circles. She stopped abruptly, seeing an odd shape looming in the quickly gathering fog of the encroaching night. Thinking it better than any of the ancient cars surrounding her or getting captured by the Fallen, she quickly moved toward the structure. As she neared it, she realized it was a ship, partially enveloped by a small copse of very old looking pine trees.

“Is that…It is! A Fallen skiff!” she exclaimed. “From the looks of it, it’s been here a while.”

A very loud roar followed by harsh guttural scatterings broke her wonder, and she quickly rushed inside through the hatches near the stern of the bizarre ship. Safely inside she turned on her light and was amazed by what she saw. The inside of the skiff was pristine, looking as it had when it crashed. The odd thing was, it didn’t look like a crash. Everything was too neat, too…distinctly not destroyed.

She moved toward the bow of the ship, passing rows and rows of ancient Fallen weapons, still in their racks. Waiting for hands that would never come.

“Wow,” she said, looking closer at the weapons, “These are old. Like pre-Golden Age old. They’re very similar to what the Fallen use now, but more sophisticated…”

She continued looking around the ship in awe when she realized just how old it had to be. The Golden Age ended hundreds of years ago, which would make the skiff among the first to reach Earth. Almost at the bow and still dazed by her epiphany, she started to notice the distinct lack of bodies.

“Strange…”, she pondered. “This doesn’t appear to be a crash site. Everything is intact. Which means this was a purposeful landing, but then why is it here? The Fallen never abandon their things, especially something as large and hard to come by as a skiff. So, where is the crew?”

With this thought in mind, she finally made it to the cockpit and pushed inside. The cockpit had been obscured by the trees from the outside, along with most of the bow of the ship, so what she saw surprised her. A large bough of one of the pine trees pierced the glass of the cockpit. The fact that there was glass alone was startling, as every skiff she’d ever seen used a series of cameras on the bow to navigate instead of traditional windows. Metal tends to be much stronger than glass under a vacuum.

As if she weren’t already startled, dazed, and amazed, she looked down into the captain’s seat and gasped. Pinned through the chest by the pine bough sat an ancient Fallen Captain, covered in lichen and other plant matter hardy enough to survive in the frigid remains of Russia.

“Ok this is really weird,” Iris mumbled.

Fallen Captains were known to be expert fliers, so why was this one killed by a tree of all things? The ship was intact and was clearly functioning when it landed, so the captain had to have been alive and conscious when it happened.

“I wonder if the captain was ill? Maybe it was just conscious enough to land, but not to realize where,” she said as she circled around the strange scene, looking for any information to help shed some light.

As she did this, she came to notice some strange things about the dead Fallen. It was much smaller than any Captain she had seen, which was quite a few given their abundance in the Cosmodrome. Its mask was of a similar disposition, lacking the flair Captains usually possessed. Instead of having large horns sweeping back from the top, this Captain’s mask simply had two tiny horns protruding from the forehead, the rest covered in black feathers where hair would be on a human. Lastly Iris noticed that this Fallen had…breasts? They were very small, but the contour of its, her, armor defined them enough that it was clear the Captain was female.

“Ok I’m seriously weirded out now,” Iris mumbled under her breath. “There are female Fallen? Or maybe were? This skiff is hundreds of years old, so I wonder if the Fallen used to be more diverse than those we know today…”

The Captain, aside from clearly being female, was definitely Fallen. Iris didn’t know if Fallen were mammalian or not, but humans didn’t have four arms, so that left her with…a female Fallen. As Iris pondered the implications of this, she felt a strange twinge in the back of her mind. Shaking it off, she froze as she heard another roar from outside. Farther away. Good, the Fallen troop hunting her was moving elsewhere for the night.

Night. While she was inside the skiff hiding and exploring, night had descended on the Cosmodrome. Iris moved back aft to the launch bay of the skiff, the bay hatches angled up due to the skiff’s position with the nose in the ground. She looked off in the distance toward the massive structure saturated with blinking lights in the distance: the Wall. One of the last bastions between the Last City and the wilds of what was left of Earth. She sighed. The Wall was at least a ten hour trek from where she was, and she was not about to make that journey in the dark. Resigned, she returned to the cockpit and looked for a place to sleep for the night, thinking about the unavoidable ass-chewing from Ikora she was in for when she got back to the Tower.

Just as Iris was settling into a little nook in the cockpit, she glanced at the dead Captain once more, still in shock and, quite honestly, ecstatic about the fact that she had found something so unlikely. Humanity knew very little about the Fallen, even having fought with them for the past nearly 600 years. The Captain in front of her was a testament to that, and Iris didn’t know what to make of it. As the songs of sleep were encroaching on her mind, she felt that twinge again and wondered what it meant.

◊◊◊ 

Sharply inhaling, Iris woke, confused.

“Oh. Right. I slept in an ancient fallen skiff with my best bud to avoid getting trashed by Fallen reavers,” she muttered sarcastically.

Yawning she looked around the cockpit, hoping that dawn’s light might shed some other clues as to what happened to her mysterious Captain.

“Why can’t you, I don’t know, not be dead so you can tell me what the hell happened to you?” Iris said to the Captain’s unresponsive corpse. “Yeah I didn’t think you’d really have a response for that…”

As she moved closer to the Captain, she felt another twinge in her mind, this time very strong. Painful even. Directional. Pointing toward the Captain.

“No way…” she said, hardly believing the thoughts racing through her mind.

She approached the Captain and began scanning her, jumping back after a few seconds. It was there. The Spark. This Captain, who was supposed to be a minion of the Darkness, was harboring a Spark of Light.

“What the hell…?” she said.

Iris had spent years, decades even, untethered. Nearly every other Ghost she knew had found someone to be their Guardian, be it a human, Exo, or even an elusive Awoken. Never before had she heard of a Fallen Guardian. Ikora was already going to be pissed at her for being outside the Wall after dusk, so really what else did she have to lose?

Iris moved back to the Captain and this time, instead of scanning her, she started pumping light into the corpse. As she did the Captain’s body twitched. Once. Twice. The Captain gasped and her arms shuddered. As her head began to move she grabbed at the pine bough still pinning her in place, but couldn’t move it.

“Holy shit. Holy. Shit.” Iris said, hardly believing what was happening before her.

The Captain let go of the branch, falling lax again. Not dead, but very, very weak. Iris moved a bit closer and tilted up to look the Captain in the face.

“Eyes up Guardian,” she said, glee apparent in her voice.

“Ugh. Where am I? Who are you? Who am I?” the Captain whispered tiredly in an ancient dialect of the Fallen language, Eliksni.

“Well, I can answer two of those questions confidently,” Iris stated in Eliksni, “My name is Iris. I’m your Ghost. And we are currently in a crashed skiff in the Cosmodrome on Earth.”

“Skiff? Why am I being stabbed by a tree and how am I not dead?” the Captain wondered quietly.

“Well actually, you were dead. For almost 600 years, by my guess. To answer your other questions, a skiff is the type of ship we are currently in, and I assume it is your ship, as you are in the captain’s seat. As to why you are being stabbed by a tree, your guess is as good as mine. Maybe you pissed it off?”

“Ha ha. Ow. Can you maybe help me…?” the Captain trailed off as she actually looked at Iris. What she saw was a tiny metal orb surrounded by tinier floating spikes floating in front of her. “Or maybe not, considering you don’t appear to have arms.”

“Excuse you! I may not have arms, but I can certainly get you out of there. I am your Ghost after all!” Iris exclaimed proudly.

“Ghost?”

“Yes, Ghost. I am an embodiment of the Traveler’s Light. Ghosts are duty-bound to find a suitable Guardian to tether to so the Traveler can repel the Darkness. Guardians are dead heroes and soldiers from ages past that we can resurrect with the Traveler’s Light. You died in this skiff centuries ago, but now you are here. And now, you are deathless.”

“Ok that’s actually really cool, but how does that get this tree out of me?”

“It’s not about removing the tree from you, but rather you from the tree,” Iris said, a smile in her voice. “I’ve always wanted to do this!”

Iris backed up from the Captain a meter or so and began glowing. As she did the spikes surrounding her main body began spinning wildly and the Captain began to glow. A few seconds later, the Captain’s body burst into a plume of glowing motes of light and coalesced just in front of Iris, turning corporeal after another few seconds.

“What did you just do?” the Captain asked somewhat breathlessly, now standing.

“I told you, Guardian, you are deathless. So long as we are tethered, I can resurrect you wherever I am.”

“Wow that’s awesome. So. What now?”

“Well we are currently miles from the Wall and without any means of transportation. And before you say it, this thing is about as sky-worthy as Zavala.”

“What’s a Zavala?” the Captain asked.

“Ohh, you’ll see. For now we need to get out of this skiff and start making our way back to the Wall. Maybe we can find some transportation on our way.”

With that, Iris and the Captain made their way back to the hatches Iris had entered the evening before. They dropped to the ground, the Captain balancing herself with her four arms and Iris floating down next to her. They began making their way back to the car covered road Iris had roamed the previous day.

“What should I call you?” Iris asked the Captain.

“What do you mean?”

“Well I could call you ‘Guardian’ or ‘Captain’, but that’s no fun. You need a name. Do you remember what your name was before you died?”

“No…I don’t remember anything. All I can remember is waking up to your voice and being pinned, quite painfully, by a tree.”

“Hmm. Your feathers remind me of a crow, so how about Crow?”

“I don’t know what that is, but sure, why not.”

“Crows are large, very intelligent black birds.”

“Oh. Cool. Crow it is.”

Iris and Crow began picking their way between and over the seemingly endless field of cars, working their way back toward the wall. Iris’ best guess was that it would take them most of the day to get back to the wall without a ship, so they kept at it for a few hours. Around noon, they passed by a small group of buildings and heard several roars in the distance. Crow froze and looked to Iris next to her.

“Fallen,” Iris whispered. “Not like you. You’re about as different from them as they are from the humans. Much older obviously, but also born from the Light. They are minions of Darkness. We could try to reason with them, but I’m not sure they would understand this dialect and the reavers are prone to violence before words.”

“Alright so what do we do?”

“For now let’s get into one of those buildings and look for a weapon.”

The pair made their way into one of the buildings, a garage. Crow looked around and spotted a pistol sitting on a cabinet along the wall. She picked it up and found that it was still in good shape. She also found a small box of ammo in the cabinet. Ejecting the magazine, she found that it held 9 rounds and the box of ammo she found had 30 in it. She filled the magazine, put it in the gun, and pulled the slide. Satisfied, she walked to the other side of the garage where Iris was floating over a long covered object, scanning it.

“I found a small pistol. 30 rounds.” said Crow as she approached.

“Good, I’ll store the leftover ammo for you. I can supply it whenever your clip runs dry, that way you don’t have to physically carry it. In other news, I think I found our way out of here.”

“Oh?”

“Take this sheet off, I found us a Sparrow, or more specifically a Kestrel, one of the original models from the Golden Age.”

The sector of the Cosmodrome Iris decided to patrol was proving to be quite the treasure trove. As Crow pulled the sheet off the Kestrel, they both gasped in awe. It had a small body with a seat on it, similar to a motorcycle, but instead of shifting pegs, it had two stirrup-like protrusions aiming backward. In place of a rear wheel was a large jet thruster flanked by four smaller thrusters. In place of a front wheel, there were two long, slender rectangular metal fins extending over a meter from the body. There was a small display between two handle bars that came up flanking the front of the body. The whole thing was painted in intricate black and white and rested on the ground, leaning forward slightly due to the stirrups.

“How does this thing work?” Crow mused.

“I don’t know the specifics, but it has a gravity engine in the body as well as a fusion reactor that provides thrust. It should float about a foot off the ground and be very fast. You’ll control the speed with your right hand and brake with your left. As far as steering goes, I think it’s a combination of moving the handle bars, leaning, and pushing the stirrups with your feet to control the yaw. Nothing too crazy.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Hey at least if you die, I can just resurrect you.” Iris teased.

Crow rolled her eyes and climbed on to the Kestrel, pushing what appeared to be the ignition. Amazingly, after however long it had been in the garage, it started and lifted off the ground. Crow and Iris looked at one another again and started giggling.

“This is. So cool.” Crow said with glee.

“Indeed, little one. I’m going to phase into you for the ride, ok? It’s hard to explain, but for lack of better terms, I’ll be riding in your soul. We can still talk and everything, I just won’t be physical.”

“Um, that sounds weird as hell, but alright. Let’s get going.”

Crow pushed on the ground with her left foot and pulled on the handlebar with her top right hand, turning the Kestrel to the right and away from the wall. Simple enough. She twisted her right hand back toward her slightly and heard the engines whine a bit louder. The Kestrel floated forward. Crow grabbed the other handlebar with her top left hand. She checked to make sure her gun was reachable with her bottom right hand, then placed both bottom hands on the body of the Kestrel to stabilize herself.

“Ready?” Iris’ voice said in her ears.

“Let’s see what this thing can do,” Crow grinned.

Crow opened the throttle and the Kestrel started moving forward. As they exited the garage, she pushed the stirrup with her right foot, pushed with her right hand, and pulled with her left hand, causing the Kestrel to easily make a gliding left turn out of the garage. She kept off the car littered road and stayed on a relatively clear path. Rocks and debris didn’t matter much, as the Kestrel floated, but she still had to avoid large rocks to avoid crashing.

“Alright, let’s see how fast we can get to the Wall.” Crow said with a smirk on her face, as she opened the throttle all the way.

The Kestrel positively screamed, both figuratively and literally. The fusion engine combined with the compressed plasma leaving the thrusters made a high pitched whine with a rumbling undertone that Crow felt in her very bones. She reveled in the vibrations she felt travel up her lower arms as she leaned into the body. The tach in front of her masked face read some crazy high energy output and the digital speedometer was maxed out. She started giggling as the wind whipped by her feathered mask and they zoomed toward the Wall.


End file.
